Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a public health priority, and vaccination is important for ending the pandemic. Racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionally affected by COVID-19 yet report high levels of vaccination hesitancy. Objective: We conducted virtual town halls to address vaccine hesitancy among racial and ethnic minorities in South Florida. Methods: Our approach used social influence and persuasion models. In a formative phase, we gathered meeting preferences from our communities and developed and tested our approach. In an implementation phase, we conducted 6 virtual town halls in partnership with 6 different minority-focused community-based organizations. Results: The town halls reached 379 participants (mean age 36.6 years; 63.9% female, 33.5% male, 0.3% nonbinary; 55.8% racial or ethnic minority). Of these 379 participants, 69 completed both polls who were unvaccinated at the time. Among these nonvaccinated participants, at the prepoll, 58% reported a high likelihood of seeking vaccination, rising to 72.5% at the exit poll, which was a statistically significant change. Unvaccinated non-hesitant and hesitant groups were compared on trusted information sources and reasons and barriers for vaccination. Nonhesitant participants reported greater trust in the COVID-19 Task Force (97.3% vs. 83.3%) as a source of vaccine information than did hesitant participants. Nonhesitant participants were statistically significant more likely to endorse family safety (82.5% vs. 63.2%), community safety (72.5% vs. 26.3%), personal safety (85% vs. 36.8%), and wanting to return to a normal life (70% vs. 31.6%) as reasons for vaccination than were hesitant participants. Hesitant participants were statistically significant more likely to endorse concerns about vaccine safety (63.2% vs. 17.5%) as barrier to vaccination than were nonhesitant participants. Qualitative data revealed high consumer satisfaction with the town halls. Conclusion: This study supports the feasibility, acceptability, and potential impact of virtual town halls for addressing vaccine hesitancy among racial or ethnic minorities; however, our approach was resource intensive, required an extensive community-university collaborative infrastructure, and yielded a small effect.

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The NIH-funded Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI) program is currently funding 18 academic institutions to strengthen the research environment and contribution to health disparities research. The purpose of this multiphase mixed-methods study was to establish a uniform evaluation framework for demonstrating the collective success of this research consortium. Methods included discussions of aims and logic models at the RCMI Evaluators’ Workshop, a literature review to inform an evaluation conceptual framework, and a case study survey to obtain evaluation-related information and metrics. Ten RCMIs participated in the workshop and 14 submitted responses to the survey. The resultant RCMI Evaluation Conceptual Model presents a practical ongoing approach to document RCMIs’ impacts on health disparities. Survey results identified 37 common metrics under four primary categories. Evaluation challenges were issues related to limited human resources, data collection, decision-making, defining metrics, cost-sharing, and revenue-generation. There is a need for further collaborative efforts across RCMI sites to engage program leadership and community stakeholders in addressing the identified evaluation challenges and measurement. Program leadership should be engaged to apply the Evaluation Conceptual Framework and common metrics to allow for valid inter-institutional comparisons and consortium-wide evaluations. Stakeholders could ensure evaluation metrics are used to facilitate community impacts.

By the spring of 2021, most of the adult U.S. population became eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet, by the summer of 2021, the vaccination rate stagnated. Given the immense impact COVID-19 has had on society and individuals, and the surge of new variant strains of the virus, it remains urgent to better understand barriers to vaccination, including the impact of variations in trusted sources of COVID-19 information. The goal of the present study was to conduct a cross-sectional, community-engaged, and person-centered study of trusted sources of COVID-19 information using latent profile analysis (LPA). The aims were to (1) identify the number and nature of profiles of trusted sources of COVID-19 information, and (2) determine whether the trust profiles were predictive of COVID-19 vaccination attitudes and various demographic categories. Participants included mostly racial and ethnic minority individuals (82.4%) recruited by various community-based agencies in South Florida. The LPA evidenced an optimal 3-class solution characterized by low (n = 80)-, medium (n = 147)-, and high (n = 52)-trust profiles, with high trust statistically significantly predictive of vaccination willingness. The profiles identified could be important targets for public health dissemination efforts to reduce vaccine hesitancy and increase COVID-19 vaccination uptake. The general level of trust in COVID-19 information sources was found to be an important factor in predicting COVID-19 vaccination willingness.